From a linguistic point of view, the long inscriptions of Murfatlar
are most interesting, since they contain something, which science was missing
up to now - comprehensive texts in Proto-Bulgarian. So far the linguistics
had at its disposal isolated words, whose meaning was inferred from Greek
inscriptions and Slavic handwritings. Alternative and contradicting to
one another hypotheses about the origin of the Proto-Bulgarians were advanced
in the last two hundred years since the formulation of this question -
the Proto-Bulgarians were proclaimed to be Turco-Tatars (the end
of the XVIII century), Finns, or for a mixture of Finns, Turcs and Slavs
(the theory of Acad. Frenn). Later they were regarded as Slavs, then as
Huns and even later - as Samoeds, until at the end of the nineteenth century
they were said to be Chuvash . None of them looked plausible enough in
order to outweigh the others.

Now for first time the science has on its disposal texts more comprehensive
than the longest text in Proto-Bulgarian in Greek letters - the inscription
of Nagy Saint Miklos (consisting of 9 words). Compared to the other long
text in Greek letters - the inscription of Preslav, they have the advantage
of presenting the real language and not just an enumeration of military
articles. The longest inscription from Murfatlar consists of 35 characters
comprising 11 words, the second longest one has 29 characters (10 words)
(see Supplement 3, inscriptions
14, 13). The individual
words of the first inscription are clearly distinguished one from another
by separators typical for runic writings - colons and points.

In the second inscription, (particularly in its first section) there
is a set of words marked with "tilde" which enables the distinguishing
of the individual words. Another group of relatively long inscriptions
there are no separators but the words are arranged in separate lines, as
it is observed in the inscriptions in Proto-Bulgarian with Greek letters
(see Supplement 3, inscription
20).

These features as well as a number of other details facilitate the decoding
of the long inscriptions. The second longest inscription contains two quite
special characters resembling those, discovered in the eastern part of
the mountains Imeon and in the former Kubrat Bulgaria. Besides in Murfatlar,
the first character is found in a number of holy items from other places
- on a stone lion discovered in a former camp near Omurtag. It was a special
Proto-Bulgarians symbol with roots in the ancient writings of Western Asia
- for example in Aramaic, where it had the same appearance and phonetic
value. Another character (KH) also originates from that area. It appears
in the same form in inscriptions from the Imeon mountains while it was
somewhat rounded in Kubrat Bulgaria. These characters clear up the still
existing doubts about the Proto-Bulgarian origin of the inscriptions of
Murfatlar. They are also not new to the Bulgarian Palaeographics since
they, together with three other characters from Murfatlar, were discovered
on a bronze rosette in Pliska (see
Supplement 3, 21).

Two more characters from an inscription from Bjala (near Varna) likewise
their have parallels from the Imeon mountains.

The problem with the characters was treated more extensively now, since
approximately twenty years ago the Romanian researchers attempted to attribute
the inscriptions of Murfatlar to the Goths. They argued that this type
of inscriptions was characteristic for Murfatlar alone and differed from
that in Bulgaria. As we see now, however, exactly the same writing was
also used in Pliska and also in other smaller early-Bulgarian finds. The
attempts to represent these inscriptions as a purely local feature of Murfatlar
are completely untenable. The Gothic hypothesis is a somewhat irresponsible
scientific fiction (see the well-known Gothic runic alphabet
in Supplement 7).